OUR LIGHT infantry and grenadier companies were transported across the St Lawrence River and marched to Boucherville, where we found the flank companies of the other regiments assembled, and took part with them in combined manœuvres under the approving eye of General Burgoyne.
General Burgoyne had spent the winter in England, together with several other officers of the army in Canada who were, like him, members of Parliament, and had there endeavoured to persuade the Ministry that he was far fitter to command the expedition against Ticonderoga than General Carleton. He alleged that General Carleton had been slow to press his advantage in the previous campaign, when he might have taken Ticonderoga almost without loss, and thus struck a resounding blow against the rebels; and that General Carleton was by no means beloved of the troops.
Now, the Secretary for War was Lord George Germaine. The greater part of the Army was unaware who this person might be, and gave no attention to the matter. But one day in this same summer I was greatly astonished to learn some particulars of his previous history. It happened in this manner. I had come upon old Sergeant Fitzpatrick and two sergeants of the Twentieth Regiment who, the day being July 31st, were drinking together in our bivouac. All wore roses in their caps to commemorate the glorious victory of Minden of which this was the anniversary, for before the battle the troops had lain in a rose garden and thus gaily decked themselves in contempt of the French. Now up rode stout old General Phillips. He stopped to shake the hands of his comrades-in-arms, but, says he, very sharply to Sergeant Fitzpatrick: ‘How come you by this rose? I never heard that The Ninth fought at Minden.’
‘No, General Phillips,’ rejoined the sergeant, ‘but The Twenty-third did so fight, with whom I then had the honour of serving, and in the leading line too. I remember your Honour on that occasion, how you split no less than fifteen canes on the rumps and sides of your sweating horses in bringing the guns up. And if I may make bold enough to say it, sir, I am right glad that today we have no Lord George Sackville in command of our cavalry.’
This Lord George Sackville had been in command of the British cavalry on that famous occasion and behaved very ill. An order had been given to the infantry to advance when they heard the beat of a signal drum. An aide-de-camp in a hurry conveyed the message that six British battalions and two of Germans were to advance at the beat of the drum; but this became mistakenly changed into an order to advance ‘at beat of drum’. This they did forthwith, very courageously, despite a cruel cross-fire of artillery, before the French were marshalled in position; and by their unassisted efforts drove off the held a great mass of enemy infantry and – an unheard-of feat – a force of French cavalry of double their number. Lord George Sackville was hastily desired by Prince Ferdinand, the allied Commander, to pursue the routed French with his cavalry, but he stood fast, either from cowardice or because of personal pique against the Prince, pretending that he did not understand how the movement was to be carried out. Our noble Colonel, then plain Captain Ligonier, came galloping up to ask Lord George why he delayed. A Colonel Sloper, of the cavalry, cried out to Captain Ligonier, pointing in exasperation at his Lordship: ‘For God’s sake, repeat your orders to that man, that he may not pretend to misunderstand them, for it is near half an hour ago that he received orders to advance and yet we are still here. You see the condition he is in!’ But the moment had passed, and Prince Ferdinand was robbed of the fruits of what was, even so, the most resounding victory of the whole century. Lord George Sackville, being in due course court-martialled, was found guilty and very rightly adjudged unfit ever again to command British soldiers in the field.
General Phillips now looked at Sergeant Fitzpatrick in a very peculiar manner. ‘No,’ said he shortly, ‘Lord George Sackville does not command the cavalry of this Northern army, but Lord George Germaine sits in his chair at Downing Street; and there directs and co-ordinates the military operations of the Northern, the Southern, and the Eastern armies.’
One of the sergeants of The Twentieth then remarked: ‘Aye, your Honour, I am sorry to hear that – for though I know little about this lord I have read that he is a sad Whig, having even been approached by that rascal Charles Fox to lead the Opposition. They say that he refused only because – as he frankly owned – to lead an Opposition was an ill paid and thankless task, and he had debts of honour which must be paid at all events. I cannot think that he will manage his task well. But better a thousand times to have such a Whig in the Secretary’s chair than a traitor of the quality of Lord George Sackville.’
General Phillips very gravely: ‘They are one and the same person. “That man”, when he inherited the Germaine estates, changed his name accordingly.’
Well, this Lord George Sackville, or Germaine, nursed a long-standing hatred against a number of generals and other officers: all such as had avoided his company since the notorious court martial fixed so sable a blot upon his name. Among these was General Carleton who had, besides, refused to job for him politically; and his Lordship therefore lent a ready ear to General Burgoyne’s insinuations, and even recommended to the King that General Carleton should be recalled from the Government of Canada. King George scented rancour and prejudice. He consented that General Burgoyne, as an energetic officer, should be put in command of our expedition; yet he retained General Carleton in his government. General Carleton was much mortified and sent in his resignation: for General Burgoyne, as an independent commander, would now be taking orders directly from Lord George Germaine, General Carleton’s professed enemy, and at the same time making requisitions upon the resources of Canada which must be supplied willy-nilly and with all dispatch. When this resignation was refused, however, General Carleton very loyally and generously did everything in his power to assist the arms of his supplanter.
It will be recalled that the British plan of attack was a simultaneous converging upon Albany, on Hudson’s River, of three armies: General Howe’s northward from New York, General Prescott’s westward from Rhode Island, ours southward from Canada. To co-ordinate the movements of three separate armies requires a watchful and controlling central power, great nicety in calculating times and distances, and perfect secrecy. The task would be formidable enough in a country so enormous as America, and with so difficult communications by land and river, even when the three armies were directed along interior lines of defence, namely lines drawn from the centre of the country outward to the frontiers; but was quite desperate when these armies must simultaneously attack inwards from positions on the frontier separated from one another by hundreds of miles of wilderness, and with no possibility of communication between them. For if then the central armies were well handled in opposition, they would mass in superior force against each of the three converging columns in turn, and destroy them piecemeal. It was plain madness to allow such a plan to be directed by any person at all, however gifted, from a distance of three thousand miles away – let alone one who had never set foot in America, or had any notion of conditions there, who relied for his information on prejudiced and inaccurate sources, who could not keep regular office hours or a secret, and who bore an inveterate grudge against the whole British Army. Yet such was the indulgence given by King George, long before he had shown any other signs of the lunacy that afterwards deprived him of his sovereignty, to Lord George Germaine!
I may here append that King George was as unfortunate in his choice of a minister to control his ships upon the sea, as in his choice of a minister to control his armies upon land: for the First Lord of the Admiralty was the ill-living, revengeful, and incompetent Earl of Sandwich, known to all as ‘Jemmy Twitcher’, after the libertine of that name in Mr Gay’s comedy of The Beggar’s Opera. It was he who, twenty years before, had been High Priest of that blasphemous and orgiastic fraternity, the Hellfire Club, alias the Society of the Monks of Medmenham Abbey; nor had he changed his nature since that day. He was as cordially hated by his admirals as Lord George Germaine by his generals, for he added hypocrisy to ill-living, and wilful mismanagement of the Navy to hypocrisy. When the Court and Cabinet were set upon revenge against the notorious John Wilkes, the libertarian, whose unseating and reseating as a member of Parliament was the chief political topic of the years before the war, his Lordship was called upon to discredit him in the House of Lords. He did so by reading aloud to the scandalized house a ribald poem composed by this Wilkes, and asked the Lords to brand it as an impious and obscene document; as if their Lordships were unaware that the same John Wilkes, who had also been a Medmenham monk, had printed this composition some years before, for private circulation in the club. Shortly after this, at a performance of The Beggar’s Opera, that odious character, Mr Peachum, whose practice was virtuously to peach on his scoundrelly associates when they were of no further assistance to him, set the whole house in a roar by remarking how surprised he was that Jemmy Twitcher should peach. As for this Jemmy Twitcher’s mismanagement of his office: he starved the dockyards, sold contracts through his mistress, Miss Ray, who presided at the Admiralty as if a coroneted countess and was an unconscionable bargainer, allowed our strength in line-of-battle ships to fall far below the modicum needed for the safety of our coasts, yet lyingly informed the Lords to the contrary, pretending that three times as many frigates were in commission as was actually the case. He also oppressed and cheated those deserving old sea-dogs, the Greenwich Pensioners, who were under his sole charge; and conspired to ruin by calumny and subterfuge a number of eminent and courageous captains and admirals of the Navy – among them ‘Black Dick’, General Howe’s brother, and ‘Little Keppel’. But in spite of all these wicked actions the noble Earl remained in power, as did Lord George Germaine, until the war was irretrievably lost: namely, five years after the period of which I am now writing.
However, we could then know nothing of what lay in pickle for us, and had perfect confidence in General Burgoyne, in our own arms, and in the righteousness of our cause.
Our fleet had been strengthened by a new frigate, the Royal George; and a radeau, big as a castle, which was sunk at St John’s by the Americans in the previous year, had been raised from the river-bed. Our army consisted of some four thousand British troops and three thousand German. Two thousand Canadian levies had been expected to swell our numbers but the service proved unpopular. No more than one hundred and fifty appeared in arms with us; they hung back even from transport work. Besides these, there were the Indians, many hundreds of whom had promised to take up the hatchet.
At the beginning of June 1777 we marched out of Canada by way of St John’s and encamped on the western side of Lake Champlain; where we waited for batteaux to transport us, under convoy of the fleet, to the southern extremity of the lake, close to Crown Point.
In our passage down the lake we frequently encamped upon the islands, the brigades regularly following one another, and making about seventeen to twenty miles a day. The order of progress was so regulated that each brigade occupied at night the encampment vacated in the morning by the brigade preceding. It would have been a very pleasant time had it not been for the mosquitoes, which were more venomous here than anywhere else on the American continent, but only at Skenesborough, a little farther to the south, where (as General Washington himself averred) they would not scruple to bite through boot and stocking. At this time great clouds of turtle-doves were migrating from New York State past us into Canada; they were decorated with beautiful plumage of shifting hues and were much wearied by their long flight. It was with difficulty that they gained the trees near our bivouac to roost upon, and some even dropped into the water and drowned. Our people struck them down from the branches with sticks and wrung their necks as they fell. Turtle-doves furnished subsistence for six weeks of the year to the Canadian farmer, who erected ladders from the ground to the tops of the pines where the flocks were accustomed to resort. The turtle-doves perched upon the ladders, several to each rung. Coming softly to the trees by night with a musket full of small shot, the Canadian would fire upwards along each ladder and seldom fail to kill or wound forty or fifty birds, which he would subsequently eat in a delicious fricassee with garlic and sour cream.
An event remarkable, even if it can be dismissed as coincidence, occurred as we were approaching Crown Point. Picture to yourself the scene: a fine June day with the wide lake undisturbed by a breeze, and the whole army in array, forming a perfect regatta, a great number of Indians paddling ahead in their birchen canoes, twenty or thirty to a canoe, followed by the advanced corps, our Light Infantry and Grenadiers, the Canadians and a few American Loyalist volunteers, upon the gunboats; next, the two frigates, Royal George and Inflexible, towing large booms, the schooners, sloops, and other ships a little astern, including the newly raised radeau which transported the heavy artillery; after them the first brigade, with scarlet uniforms and flashing arms, in a regular line of batteaux and with the three generals in their smart pinnaces following next, the second brigade, an equally brave sight, with the German brigades supporting; and far in the rear, the sutlers and camp-followers pushing along in a variety of craft.
The crystal surface of the lake became an indefinitely extended mirror reflecting the calm heavens, the tall trees of the islands past which we sailed, the great flock of laden boats and ships. It was like some stupendous fairy-scene of a dream, which the waking fancy can hardly conceive.
In our gunboat it happened that nobody was supplied with a tinderbox, though several of us felt the need of a pipe of tobacco. However, I rummaged in my knapsack and found there a dry piece of the fungus which I kept as a specific against the flux, together with a burning-glass and a candle-end of yellow wax. I concentrated the rays of the sun in a focus upon the fungus, which soon broke into flame when I blew upon it; whereupon I lighted the candle from this tinder and it was passed from hand to hand among the smokers on the benches.
All at once the sun was darkened by a cloud and a most violent and unexpected tempest blew up from the Green Mountains to the north-east, so that the whole vast sheet of water was agitated in a terrible manner. A small sloop carrying but little sail, not fifty yards from us, was laid flat on her side by the first gusts and the crew were obliged to chop away the masts in order to right her. I thought that the greater part of the army must of necessity be swallowed up, for the batteaux were most unmanageable vessels in rough weather and now heaved about frightfully. Suddenly a superstitious thought crossed my mind: I had inadvertently lighted the Holy Thursday candle in a flat calm and had therefore been instrumental in loosing the very danger that these two inches of bees-wax had been intended to allay! I noticed that one of my comrades still held the lighted relic under the shelter of his greatcoat, where he was endeavouring to kindle his pipe from it. I snatched it from him, when it was instantly extinguished, and, lo, the storm began sensibly to abate. The whole brigade of batteau weathered the storm safely except for two, carrying men of The Ninth, both of which swamped just as they got close in shore, but our comrades were within their depth and lost neither their lives nor their arms.
At the mouth of the River Bouquet, where we finally disembarked, a great body of Indians joined us, and General Burgoyne held a Congress with their chiefs and principal warriors. Not only had the Six Nations appeared in full strength, but their sworn enemies the Algonquins and Wyandots also. General Burgoyne addressed them through an interpreter in his oratund manner, as follows:
CHIEFS AND WARRIORS,
The Great King, our common Father, and the patron of all who seek and deserve his protection, has considered with satisfaction the general conduct of the Indian tribes, from the beginning of the troubles in America. Too sagacious and too faithful to be deluded or corrupted, they have observed the violated rights of the parental power they love, and burned to vindicate them. A few individuals alone, the refuse of a small tribe, at the first were led astray: and the misrepresentations, the specious allurements, the insidious promises, the diversified plots in which the rebels are exercised, and all of which they employed for that effect, have served only in the end to enhance the honour of the tribes in general, by demonstrating to the world how few and how contemptible are the apostates! It is a truth known to you all, these pitiful examples excepted (and they have probably, before this day, hid their faces in shame) that the collective voices and hands of the Indian tribes, over this vast continent, are on the side of justice, of law, and of the King.
The restraint you have put upon your resentment in waiting the King your Father’s call to arms, the hardest proof, I am persuaded, to which your affection could have been put, is another manifest and affecting mark of your adherence to that principle of connection to which you were always fond to allude, and which is the mutual joy and the duty of the parent to cherish.
The clemency of your Father has been abused, the offers of his mercy have been despised, and his further patience would, in his eyes, become culpable, in as much as it would withhold redress from the most grievous oppressions in the provinces that ever disgraced the history of mankind. It therefore remains for me, the General of one of His Majesty’s armies, and in this Council his representative, to release you from those bonds which your obedience imposed – Warriors, you are free – go forth in might and valour of your cause – strike at the common enemies of Great Britain and America – disturbers of public order, peace, and happiness, destroyers of commerce, parricides of state.
The General, then pointing to the officers, both German and British, who attended this meeting, proceded:
The circle round you, the Chiefs of His Majesty’s European forces, and of the Princes his allies, esteem you as brothers in the war; emulous in glory and in friendship, we will endeavour reciprocally to give and to receive examples; we know how to value, and we will strive to imitate your perseverance in enterprise, and your constancy to resist hunger, weariness, and pain. Be it our task, from the dictates of our religion, the laws of our warfare, and the principles and interest of our policy, to regulate your passions when they overbear, to point out where it is nobler to spare than to revenge, to discriminate degrees of guilt, to suspend the uplifted stroke, to chastise and not destroy.
This war to you, my friends, is new; upon all former occasions, in taking the field, you held yourselves authorized to destroy wherever you came, because everywhere you found an enemy. The case is now very different.
The King has many faithful subjects dispersed in the provinces, consequently you have many brothers there, and these people are more to be pitied, that they are persecuted or imprisoned wherever they are discovered or suspected; and to dissemble, to a generous mind, is a yet more grievous punishment.
Persuaded that your magnanimity of character, joined to your principles of affection to the King, will give me fuller control over your minds than the military rank with which I am invested, I enjoin your most serious attention to the rules which I hereby proclaim for your invariable observation during the campaign.
I positively forbid bloodshed, when you are not opposed in arms. Aged men, women, children, and prisoners must be held sacred from the knife or hatchet, even in the time of actual conflict. You shall receive compensation for the prisoners you take, but you shall be called to account for scalps.
In conformity and indulgence of your customs, which have affixed an idea of honour to such badges of victory, you shall be allowed to take the scalps of the dead, when killed by your fire, and in fair opposition; but on no account, or pretence, or subtility or prevarication, are they to be taken from the wounded, or even dying; and still less pardonable, if possible, will it be held to kill men in that condition, on purpose, and upon a supposition that this protection to the wounded would be thereby evaded.
Base, lurking assassins, incendiaries, ravagers, and plunderers of the country, to whatever army they may belong, shall be treated with less reserve; but the latitude must be given you by order, and I must be the judge on the occasion.
Should the enemy, on their parts, dare to countenance acts of barbarity towards those who may fall into their hands, it shall be yours also to retaliate: but till this severity be thus compelled, bear immovable in your hearts this solid maxim (it cannot be too deeply impressed), that the great essential reward, the worthy service of your alliance, the sincerity of your zeal to the King, your Father and never-failing protector, will be examined and judged upon the test only of your steady and uniform adherence to the orders and counsels of those to whom His Majesty has entrusted the direction and honour of his arms.
After the General had finished his speech, they all of them cried out, ‘Etow! Etow! Etow!’ and after remaining some little time in consultation, Little Abraham, as the most respectable and aged Chief among the Six Nations rose up, and made the following answer:
I stand up, in the name of all the nations present, to assure our Father that we have attentively listened to his discourse – we receive you as the Father, because when you speak we hear the voice of our Great Father beyond the Great Lake.
We rejoice in the approbation you have expressed of our behaviour.
We have been tried and tempted by the Bostonians; but we have loved our Father, and our hatchets have been sharpened upon our affections.
In proof of the sincerity of our professions, our whole villages able to go to war are come forth. The old and infirm, our infants and wives, alone remain at home.
With one common assent, we promise a constant obedience to all you have ordered, and all you shall order, and may the Father of Days give you many, and success.
They all cried, ‘Etow, Etow’, again, and the Congress then dispersed.
A war-dance followed that same evening.
I sought out Thayendanegea meanwhile in his wigwam, who greeted me with every mark of friendship. He was in full war-paint and grasped in his hand a war-banner, consisting of a spear dressed with coloured silks, feathers of the spruce-partridge and skins of polecats. I inquired privately of him the whereabouts and condition of Kate. He told me that she was under the protection of Miss Molly in his abode by the Genisee River, and already big with child; but counselled me to forget her. She had informed him of her decision never again to be my squaw, in any event, once I had quitted her for the sake of my Duty; she would return to Harlowe, soon as her child was born, for the sake of her duty as a wife. As my friend, Thayendanegea remarked, he deeply regretted her resolution, for (clenching his hands tightly together) he knew our hearts were and would always remain thus united in love, though in body separated. He added, however, that as a Christian he felt obliged to applaud Mrs Harlowe’s resolution, reminding me that whom God had joined, no man should put asunder, etc., etc.; a text which I heard with a certain feeling of remorse, being now again in British dress and company. My life in the woods during the previous winter seemed but a beautiful and idle dream.
I asked, what would become of the child? He replied: that was provided for already.